This conversation was recorded on 20th October 2021 as a part of the exhibition Owed to a certain Emptiness: Infra-structuring the Conflictorium between Paloma McGregor and Avni Sethi held at the Aronson Galleries at The New School hosted by the Vera List Center of Art and Politics in New York.
Paloma McGregor (Director, Angelas’s Pulse) is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer who makes Black work with Black folks for Black space. A former newspaper reporter, she combines a choreographer’s craft, journalist’s urgency and anti-racist organizer’s framework to activate creative communities and shepherd collaborative visioning. Working at the growing edge of her field, McGregor is a 2020 Soros Arts Fellowship recipient, and an inaugural recipient of several major awards, including: Dance/USA’s Fellowship to Artists; Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Institute Fellowship; Surdna Foundation’s Artists Engaging in Social Change. In 2017, she won a “Bessie” Award for performance with skeleton architecture, a collective of Black women(+) improvisers. Alongside her choreographic work, McGregor founded Dancing While Black (DWB), a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange and visibility among Black dance artists whose work, like hers, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes.
Paloma McGregor Selected Readings:
To know more about the exhibition visit - https://veralistcenter.org/exhibitions/owed-to-a-certain-emptiness/
To know more about Conflictorium visit - https://www.conflictorium.org/
